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The Scottish Government already works closely with health boards, NHS Education for Scotland and the General Medical Council (GMC) to support efforts to fully eradicate bullying and harassment. Any incidence of bullying and harassment is one too many, and we have developed and revised Partnership Information Network guidance (Preventing and Dealing with Bullying and Harassment in NHSScotland) to be followed by all staff in NHS boards. This sets out minimum standards which each board must adhere to locally.

Health boards and their employees, irrespective of their position, are expected to act in line with the values and behaviours expected of everyone in NHSScotland, and we will continue to work collaboratively to tackle workplace bullying, and to encourage and support staff to raise any concerns they have about practices in the NHS.

The GMC also plays an important role in monitoring these issues through its annual national training survey and quality assurance visits. They are also using the findings of a report published earlier this year, Building a supportive environment: a review to tackle undermining and bullying in medical education and training, to better understand the nature of undermining and bullying in medical education and training, and we look forward to their recommendations where further improvements or guidance might be possible in tackling this issue.

Our staff are at the heart of our NHS. The welfare of NHS staff is critically important with every health board required to have policies in place and to comply with national policies on managing health at work.

The Staff Governance Standard for NHSScotland commits all boards to providing a continuously improving and safe working environment promoting the health and wellbeing of staff, patients and the wider community. Through our monitoring arrangements, we are ensuring that boards have policies and actions in place to support staff.

We are currently in the process of updating the Partnership Information Network (PIN) policy for Managing Health at Work. This is in consultation with boards.

We are currently in the process of updating the Managing Health at Work PIN policy that will be researched and prepared on a partnership basis involving NHSScotland employers, trade unions, professional organizations and the Scottish Government.

We are fully committed to achieving the best possible healthcare outcomes for Scotland’s people through safe, high quality care. Scotland is a world leader, internationally recognised for the improvements in care and safety the Scottish Patient Safety Programme has brought about. The care delivered by our NHS workforce is of the highest quality and we have record staffing levels with staff better equipped to deliver services than ever before.

We have backed this up by our statutory requirements on NHS boards to ensure they have workforce plans in place, and by our mandatory application of an important series of evidence-based workload and workforce tools. These enable NHS boards to assess and deploy the required numbers of appropriate staff accurately and effectively, according to the clinical needs of patients rather than by fixed staffing ratios.

The Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 already offers legal protection to NHSScotland staff members who suffer detriment for raising a genuine concern about patient safety or malpractice.

In addition, and in response to the recommendations from the ‘Freedom to Speak Up’ review, the Scottish Government is continuing to work closely with the Department of Health to ensure that UK legislation to protect whistleblowers applying for NHS jobs extends to the relevant NHS employers in Scotland.

The Scottish Public Services Ombudsman’s Complaints Standards Authority is already leading work for the Scottish Government on the development of a revised NHS complaints procedure, in line with one of the recommendations of the Scottish Health Council’s Listening and Learning report on how feedback, comments, concerns and complaints can be used to drive improvement across NHS services in Scotland. A working group, with membership drawn from across health boards, was recently convened to progress this and will meet for the first time in September 2015.

Neither the Scottish Government nor its agencies have a contract with the Scottish Provincial Press to deliver marketing or other publications.

Plans to raise public awareness of cardiac arrest are being developed in partnership with stakeholders. One strand of this will be to use European Restart a Heart Day on 16 October 2015 as a focus for activity.

There are already established emergency care pathways in place for patients who experience out of hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA). These pathways involve support from Ambulance Control Centres to help initiate bystander CPR, rapid response by the Scottish Ambulance Service and a range of emergency co-responders, for example Community First Responders and BASICS responders, resuscitation and rapid transfer to the nearest Emergency Department.

The Scottish Ambulance Service continually works to improve ambulance response times in all parts of the country. In acknowledgement of the time critical nature of cardiac arrest response and the clearly defined elements of the ‘chain of survival’, the service is working with a range of partner agencies, community responder groups and projects to optimise the chain of survival in all parts of the country. Some of these pathways are currently under development such as the Sandpiper Wildcat project, which will create a network of trained cardiac responders across the north east of Scotland. In rural Grampian there are emerging pilot projects between the Scottish Ambulance Service and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service. In other remote and rural areas the service works closely with BASICS responders and our network of Community First Responders in Scotland.

The Scottish Government published Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest: A Strategy for Scotland in March 2015. We continue to work with a wide range of stakeholders to deliver the aims of the strategy and improve outcomes for people experiencing out of hospital cardiac arrest.

In the context of a complex, multi-organisational system, it is difficult to calculate the net additional costs of improving out of hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) given that it is not clear at this stage what proportion of the proposed improvements might be absorbed through different and more effective use of existing resources. Or what efficiencies might be achieved through better co-ordination amongst stakeholders.

Since announcing in October 2014 that an OHCA strategy would be produced, the government has committed over £300,000 to support delivery. Statutory organisations, including the Scottish Ambulance Service and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, and third sector organisations, including Chest Heart and Stroke Scotland and the British Heart Foundation have also invested significant resources.